Detroit Combat

by Randy Wayne White

  Realizing for the first time that Hawker really might escape, Benny and the lighting grip left their cameras as if on cue. Donna was still trying to fix the sights of the .45 on him, so, when Brenda Paulie threw open the door and yelled, “Run!” that’s exactly what Hawker did.

  He pushed the girl through before him, slammed the door, and pulled a desk in front of it.

  From inside, a muffled shot splintered the heavy wood.

  Hawker took Brenda Paulie by the elbow and together they ran through the bank of empty offices, down the hall, and through the door into the front offices.

  Adria Bent jumped up from her desk in surprise. “Where in the hell did you go? You have absolutely no right to roam around this place unattended! You can just forget your film test, friend.”

  Quickly Hawker did three things in succession: He locked the door behind him; he painfully snapped his pants; he returned the Randall knife to its scabbard. There was an evil expression on his face, but Adria Bent refused to be intimidated.

  “I’m tempted to call some of my employees out here and have them kick the shit out of you. That’s the only thing people like you understand—”

  “Shut up,” Hawker snapped. He considered the wraparound skirt she wore. “And take off that dress—now.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I’m beyond mad, lady. I’m genuinely pissed off. So you take off that skirt without another word and give it to that nice girl holding the sheet around her.”

  Adria Bent’s eyes grew wide. “Hey, she’s one of our people. You can’t take her—”

  In one motion, Hawker grabbed the skirt and stripped it off her. The force spun the woman around like a top until she fell heavily against the desk.

  Hawker tossed the skirt to Brenda. “Can you get into that?”

  “Sure. I can tie it in front.”

  “And take my jacket too.”

  She let the sheet fall, and Hawker saw once again how badly the whip had scarred her breasts.

  Wearing only a blouse and panties, Adria Bent was turning a deep shade of red—not from embarrassment, from anger. “You touched me, you bastard! No man touches me, do you understand.…”

  Hawker ignored her screaming and opened the front door. “We’d better go,” he said to Brenda Paulie. “Running wouldn’t hurt—if you can run.”

  “I’m … I’m so tired.”

  “I know. Just hang on for a little while longer. Once we get outside, I’ll call your husband and we’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “And for you too. You’re sort of limping. I can tell you’re hurt. Did she … did she shoot you?”

  “Almost as bad. Did you see what she was doing when I kicked her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m not walking funny because she shot me.”

  “Oh? Oh!”

  From behind them came a feverish pounding on the door. Hawker pushed the girl out into the hall toward the elevator. He stepped through, then peeked back into the office.

  To a fuming Adria Bent he said, “By the way, doll, you can forget about that coffee. I’m just not in the mood anymore.”

  FIVE

  “Hello?”

  “Well, well, if it isn’t James Hawker, the famous mystery man.”

  “Famous mystery man? Can there be such a thing?”

  “Mix a vigilante with a porno star and, voilà, you have a famous mystery man.”

  “Ah!”

  “Pretty clever, huh?”

  “They don’t call you Detective Sergeant Paul McCarthy for nothing.”

  “What a coincidence that you should bring up my official position. I’m calling on official business.”

  “Gee, what an honor. Let me guess: You’ve finished your interview with Brenda Paulie, and now you want me to fill in all the hazy details, all the ambiguous wording so you can take full credit for busting a case that has been puzzling the experts for years.”

  “Years?”

  “Well, months.”

  “Nineteen months, to be exact. And it’s still puzzling the experts—but we are glad to get Brenda Paulie back. The press is demanding to know why the details of her escape are so sketchy. For some reason, the idea of an unnamed private citizen pulling off a major rescue operation, then quietly disappearing into the crowd, has captured the public’s imagination. Did you see the Free Press this morning? It called you the ‘phantom hero.’”

  “Yeah? ‘Phantom hero,’ huh? The guy who said that journalism is the lowest form of prose may have been right. The press isn’t actively searching for this phantom, is it?”

  “You got me. But just for the record, there’s no way in the world I could take credit for the rescue—not that I wouldn’t love to.” He chuckled. “Believe me, I’ve considered all the angles. The Detroit Police Department doesn’t exactly come out smelling like a rose on this one. We could use a morale boost in this case.”

  As they talked, Hawker sat in his rented bungalow not far from Jefferson Beach on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The bungalow had the sparse, vacation furniture of a summer house. In the stone fireplace, black logs hissed beneath translucent flames. Through the window, Hawker could see the gray beach beneath the gray sky and the winter expanse of the lake. He said into the phone, “There’s no way the department can come out looking good on this case, Paul. Hell, don’t blame yourself. To break it, you would have to keep shaking the tree until someone inside turned informer. Then once you got the information you needed, you would have to go through the courts to get the search warrants and the wire taps necessary to build a case. Once there was sufficient evidence, then—and only then—could you do a proper bust and free the kidnap victims. That would take months. And the citizenry doesn’t like sitting around on its thumbs while high-school girls and young mothers are being raped, sodomized, and forced to have group sex in porno films. Either way, you’re the bad guys.”

  Paul McCarthy chuckled. “So what else is new?”

  “Valid point.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it is a valid point. I guess that’s why we had to do it, Hawk. That’s why a couple of other nameless detectives and I finally took a stand. When we finally decided we needed your help, it was like telling the system to go screw itself”—he laughed again—“privately, of course.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Stupid of us, probably, but we did it anyway. See, we’d heard all these neat rumors about some auburn-haired hot shot terrorizing bad asses all around the country. We heard he hit the street gangs in L.A. and blew apart some kind of commie revolutionaries down in Florida. Like most the cops in this country, the grapevine told us about his sticking it to the Libyans in Vegas and some right-winger down in Texas. So we made up our minds to get in touch with this superman and see if we couldn’t get him in here, convince him to skip all the legalities, and just kick the ass of these sickos before they brutalized someone again.”

  Hawker played along. “Yeah. And you were very convincing.”

  “Until I finally saw you. Then I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be convincing. Turns out superman looks more like an auburn-haired James Garner—but uglier. A lot uglier.”

  “Hah!”

  “It’s true. And instead of wading in with a club, he sits back for two weeks working at his computer and going over files and memorizing photographs. Turns out our superman—this notorious rogue cop who is fast becoming a national legend—is just like any other cop, only he works harder.”

  “And I’m lucky,” Hawker put in.

  “Yeah, you’re lucky. And I’d rather be lucky than good. Say, Hawk, how did you track down Brenda Paulie, anyway?”

  “I didn’t. I was downtown and crossed the street to buy a steak-on-the-stick from a vendor, and there she was.”

  “Just like that? You picked her out of the crowd?”

  “No, first I picked out the jerk who was pimping her. Had that look about him. You know: nervous eyes, fidgety hands, chip on his shoulder. Then I took a close look at her. The trick to
memorizing people from their photos is to look at the photo and see them as they’d look completely bald. Even then, I wasn’t sure. So I followed them. You know the rest. I called you right after I called an ambulance for Brenda. How’s she doing?”

  “After only twenty-four hours of freedom, she’s doing damn well—physically, anyway. The doctors are still going over her, but they say she’s going to make it. They said you didn’t get her out of there any too soon. She lost the baby, of course, and there is a real danger of peritonitis. Emotionally she seems to be holding up, but the doctors have already gotten her into therapy. That poor girl has taken more abuse and been through more shit in the last three months than most of us get in a lifetime. She’s going to need help. Lots of it. Her husband seems to be a nice guy. He’s hanging right in there.”

  Hawker said, “Did she tell you any more about Queen Faith? Anything at all?”

  “That’s what I’m calling you about. I may have a chance to nail that bitch. Any possibility of your meeting us for dinner this evening?”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah. Detective Sergeant Riddock and me.”

  “I haven’t met Detective Riddock, have I?”

  “No, but you will tonight. Do you like ritzy food or cheap?”

  “I like all food. Let’s make it ritzy—on me.”

  “A freebee? You know we’re not allowed to accept any gifts.”

  “Is that a ‘no’?”

  “No, it’s a ‘yes.’” Paul McCarthy laughed. “Hey, I guess it’s true what they say. Once a cop goes bad, it just keeps getting easier and easier.”

  SIX

  Wearing sweatpants and a stocking cap, Hawker went for a long run. He stuck to the beach as far as he could, then had to cut up and get on the back streets because of the rugged shoreline.

  It was late afternoon, a time of eerie, desert light. A raw northeast wind whirled the snow into dust devils and blew the tops off the endless rows of waves. Seagulls on the drab sky soared out of control.

  As Hawker ran, he tried to think of a way to get inside the Queen Faith organization. He had been lucky once. But he couldn’t count on luck to see him through again.

  He needed facts. Cold, hard data. And the sooner he got it, the better.

  Back in his bungalow, Hawker put more wood on the fire then stripped off his running clothes. The floor was tile, cold beneath his feet. He wrapped a towel around himself, opened a Tuborg dark, and carried it to the shower.

  Half an hour later, he was driving in fast traffic on Woodward Avenue, headed out of the city. Detroit was getting ready for Christmas. Plastic Santas waved from used car lots, and the anticrime vapor lights were strung with red ribbon and topped with candy canes to proclaim the season of love and goodwill. On every busy street corner, women of strong faith, virginal in their dark cloaks, stood by Salvation Army kettles and clanked bells for the souls of the lost and homeless—winos, mostly.

  The snow had turned to cold drizzle. Gray clouds permeated all space between sky and earth, so smokestacks and skyscrapers were only partially visible, like the tops of mountains. Traffic was an unbroken blur of headlights; the road glistened; driving was treacherous. Hawker kept his hands at the ten-and-two position on the steering wheel of his midnight-blue Corvette fastback. He spun the radio dial past a dozen different screaming rock-and-soul stations until he finally came to an oldies program. WOWO, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Farm country.

  His spirit had begun to match the drabness of the evening. But then the WOWO disc jockey played a knockout threesome: “Don’t Worry Baby” by The Beach Boys; “Popsicles, Icicles” by The Mermaids; “Once in My Life” by The Righteous Brothers.

  By the middle of the first song. Hawker was tapping his foot. By the end of the third song, he was singing out loud, pounding out the bass part on the steering wheel.

  He turned the oldies program up full blast, and by the time he got to the restaurant he was feeling good again, grinning even.

  The name of the restaurant was The Three Sisters. To Hawker’s surprise, it was in a converted barn with a converted barnyard for a parking lot. It was a Wednesday night but the lot was nearly filled. Hawker took it as a good sign.

  The interior of the restaurant was right out of a Saturday Evening Post pictorial. Rough-hewn oak tables were covered with clean white tablecloths and there were bales of hay in the loft.

  Paul McCarthy sat alone at a corner table. Hawker had met him only once before, but he realized again that McCarthy looked less like a cop than he did the junior partner of some respected law firm. McCarthy wore a navy blazer and gray worsted slacks. The grin was boyish and the brown hair—worn stylishly long—seemed to represent a personal balance between the excesses of the late sixties and the responsibilities of the eighties. He stood when he saw Hawker and waved him over.

  “The legend walks,” McCarthy chided, “but is the legend hungry?”

  “Don’t let your hand stray near my mouth or you may lose it. Is the food any good here? Or did we just come for the cosmopolitan atmosphere?”

  “Hey, don’t knock The Three Sisters yet. Let me tell you about the place. Three Amishmen started it. Built the barn themselves, put in the kitchen, actually milled the wood to make the tables. Almost all the food they serve here comes off the farms from an Amish community outside Pontiac. They make their own breads, pies, everything.” McCarthy closed his eyes momentarily in an attitude of reverence. “And James, James, the beef is … is heavenly. It’s the best. Period. It is unbelievable. They feed the steers especially for the table. Hand-feed them nothing but corn and—here’s their secret—homemade beer.”

  “Beer?”

  “Great, huh? A quart a day. All that barley and malt really fattens ’em up. Keeps them happy too. The Amish can’t drink it, so they feed it to their private herd. The results, James, are beyond description. It didn’t take long for the word to get around, so the place started filling up. It got so popular that the Amish families finally decided to just tend to producing the food and overseeing the kitchen, and turned the rest of the responsibilities over to a manager. The quality of the food didn’t go down, but now they can serve alcohol. Speaking of which …”

  Hawker signaled the waitress and ordered a bull-shot because of the cold and a Strohs because beer was his favorite drink. She placed menus in front of them, smiled, then walked off wag-hipped toward the kitchen.

  Hawker stirred the alcohol into the beef bullion then took a sip of the bullshot. “So where is Detective Riddock? I thought he was having dinner with us.”

  McCarthy’s expression was unusual. Hawker thought it a mixture of confusion and amusement. He said, “Riddock’s always late. It’s a character flaw. But it’s good in a way, because I want to talk to you first.”

  “Sure.”

  McCarthy studied the scotch in its heavy crystal tumbler. “First, I need to fill you in on what happened when we showed up at the porno offices on East Jefferson.”

  “Let me guess: The body was gone.” Hawker smiled.

  “Wrong. The body was still there. The dead man’s name arrived from the coroner via fingerprinting: Solomon Goldblatz, alias Solly Golden, alias Steven Grosvenor—”

  “Steven Grosvenor?”

  “There’s a little bit of the wistful WASP in all of us.”

  “Ah.”

  “Goldblatz was a small-time crook but a really big-time slime. I’m talking about a real major-league puke. Officially, he was mostly a con man. There were several characters he used. One was the brilliant researcher who needed backers before he could go ahead with the experiments that would make his investors rich. What he was supposedly trying to discover varied, but usually it was a cure for arthritis or cancer. He and his people kept an eye on the obituary columns, and when someone with money died, Goldblatz was at the widow’s door before the body was cold in the ground.”

  “And the donations were usually much bigger when the deceased died of the Big C.”

  “Right.”

&
nbsp; “Charming guy.”

  “Yeah. Another one of his characters was a paternal IRS man. He would accuse people of tax fraud—everyone thinks they’re guilty of tax fraud—and then he would pretend to be sympathetic about their circumstances. For a cash contribution to his favorite charity—himself—Goldblatz would agree to overlook their offense. It was a good racket, because he made the people he conned believe that, by bribing him, they had become accessories to a crime. And they sure as hell weren’t going to turn themselves in.”

  “Pretty smart.”

  “Oh, yeah, he was shrewd. But, like I said, he was real slime.”

  “There are a lot of con men around, Paul.”

  “Not like Goldblatz. He was not only a con man, he was a kink. One of the real sickos.”

  “You’re telling me? I saw the bastard in action.”

  “But you didn’t see him in high gear. Goldblatz had been directing porno movies for years. He liked rough stuff. It helped him get his rocks off. But he liked something a lot more than violence.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Goldblatz was a child molester, Hawk. Calling him a rapist would be more accurate. He was never sent up for it, but he was arrested three times. Twice the parents of the children refused to allow their kids to testify. The third time, the kid went into a catatonic retreat, like a zombie, and there were no other witnesses. Goldblatz’s defense attorney tore the case to shreds in the chambers. Goldblatz never even spent a day in court, let alone jail.”

  “I’m suddenly real sorry I wasn’t the one who blew him away. I had the chance. I decided to give him a break. And I’m real sorry I didn’t take care of his friends too. I’ve met a lot of twisted folks in my time, but these people were beyond belief. We’re talking certifiable. Did you get a make on any of them?”

  “No. Wish we had. They had cleared out by the time we got our people there. They took everything that might have given us some clue to their identity. All they left was a couple of empty beds, some movie lights, and Goldblatz’s corpse. We’ve had the place dusted for prints. But so far Goldblatz is the only one we have on record. I’m surprised they had time to get the cameras out. We got there quick.”